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Questioningly Results: Inappropriate Literary Products

July 1, 2012

Last week, we asked you—in light of the recent failure of a New Hampshire law spearheaded by the Salinger family and intended to protect famous personages from marketing abuses after their deaths—to invent inappropriate literary projects. This touched upon two of the primary traits of our readers—their literary acumen and their tasteless sense of humor—and, as a result, it was a runaway success.

When we called for tasteless products, we meant kitsch of the rest-stop-souvenir variety, though many contestants interpreted the challenge as something more overtly morbid. We’ll leave out the many submissions involving, for example, Sylvia Plath and certain kitchen products.

But just outside the graveyard there was a strip mall selling products like the Odyssey GPS (submitted, in various forms, by @DMendelsohn1960, @lclantasaws, @marmat35, and others), Simon Legree Personal Training (“Let us whip you into shape,” submitted by @guywriter), and Miss Havisham’s cuckoo clock (submitted by @hopedellon). Those were character-based; others submissions were author-based. (Marcel Proust’s URL shortener, submitted by @DavidEdison.)

Certain works resurfaced repeatedly. Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” was a big hit for inappropriate marketers, yielding everything from Five Calendar (submitted by @kellythul) to firestarter kits (by @craigtimes) to lighter fluid (@substockman) to Billy Pilgrim 3-D glasses (submitted by @vaishnavimurali, though shouldn’t they really be 4-D?). Also popular were jokes based on Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange” (eye-drops) and Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” (day-care services), along with a dozen Lady Macbeth stain removers or handi-wipes and a number of Anna Karenina model trains.

The best were the ones that split the difference between gallows humor and the uniquely amoral opportunism of marketers—they were products that were too awful to imagine but at the same time remained entirely imaginable: for example, E. B. White’s Farm-Fresh Bacon (submitted by @jennieramstad) and Jay Gatsby swimwear (@WheelhouseRev—check to see if that doesn’t exist by the end of the year). One timely joke, while absurd, made us laugh (@AnniesPerson’s idea for Ayn Rand’s Affordable Care Act). And another, also absurd, made us give it first prize: Emily Dickinson Sunscreen, submitted by @AbLib_blog. Dickinson may have had it in mind, in fact, when she wrote the following stanza:

So, safer, guess, with just my soul Upon the window-pane Where other creatures put their eyes, Incautious of the sun.